Logrotate Not Deleting Compressed Logs

Question

I have a CentOS box running rsyslog and logrotate as my syslog server for a whole bunch of network devices. I've been toying around with this for a while, the logrotate/compression piece is working ok, but I can't seem to get it to delete the old compressed .gz logs. Here's the basic setup:

Logs are stored in: /var/log/syslog and each host creates a new sub-folder based on its IP address or hostname. I have two particular hosts that are really chatty, so I have specific rules for them to truncate after 5 GB. The idea is to compress and start a new log every day, and keep 60 days' worth of logs.

Here are my configs (most of these were not created by me, but I have maintained and modified several of them):

cat /etc/cron.hourly/logrotate

#!/bin/sh`enter code here`
/usr/sbin/logrotate -s /var/lib/logrotate/logrotate.status /etc/logrotate.conf
EXITVALUE=$?
if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then
    /usr/bin/logger -t logrotate "ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]"
fi
exit 0

cat /etc/logrotate.d/syslog

/var/log/cron
/var/log/maillog
/var/log/messages
/var/log/secure
/var/log/spooler
{
    compress
    daily
    #delaycompress
    dateext
    missingok
    rotate 60
    maxage 60
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
        /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
    endscript
}

cat /etc/logrotate.conf

/var/log/syslog/*/*.log {
daily
rotate 60
maxage 60
compress
}

daily
rotate 60
create
dateext
compress
include /etc/logrotate.d

/var/log/wtmp {
    monthly
    create 0664 root utmp
        minsize 1M
    rotate 1
}

/var/log/btmp {
    missingok
    monthly
    create 0600 root utmp
    rotate 1
}

# system-specific logs may be also be configured here.
# Specific rule for HOST_A
/var/log/syslog/HOST_A/*.log {
daily
size 5G
rotate 30
maxage 30
compress
}

# Specific rule for HOST_B
/var/log/syslog/HOST_B/*.log {
daily
size 5G
rotate 30
maxage 30
compress
}

And here is an example of what I have in my \var\log\syslog\host_a folder:

ls /var/log/syslog/HOST_A/ | wc -l

104

ls /var/log/syslog/HOST_A/ -lh

-rw------- 1 root root  416M Jun 20 23:59 HOST_A_2018_06_20.log.1.gz
-rw------- 1 root root   64M Jun 20 16:18 HOST_A_2018_06_20.log.2.gz
-rw------- 1 root root  1.5G Jun 21 23:59 HOST_A_2018_06_21.log.1.gz
<many files redacted>
-rw------- 1 root root  1.6G Sep  4 23:59 HOST_A_2018_09_04.log.1.gz
-rw------- 1 root root  1.5G Sep  5 23:59 HOST_A_2018_09_05.log.1.gz
-rw------- 1 root root  7.7G Sep  6 10:58 HOST_A_2018_09_06.log

So, you can see above, it's not removing the old archived .gz logs after 60 days. It's keeping them indefinitely. I've had to go in periodically and manually delete older files to keep size down. These files go from 6/20 to 9/6 (today), which is 104 days. I'm sure I have it misconfigured, but not sure quite what I'm missing. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You're using two mechanisms for daiy logfiles, and they're not cooperating with each other.

On the one hand you let syslog generate daily files, on the other hand you let logrotate rotate files. Logrotate will treat each daily file as a separate unique set of files (it doesn't consider HOST_A_2018_09_05.log to be related to HOST_A_2018_09_06.log) to rotate, so it never gets to five files files per pattern.

It's better to either not include the date in the filename, or let syslog do its own pruning of old files.